When I found the ’67 Camaro I mentioned in a previous post, the store had a promotion where if you buy two Hot Wheels cars you get a third one for free. But I was not interested in any of the remaining cars on display. So I asked a saleslady to get a few more Hot Wheels from storage. She came back with an armful of cars and I nonchalantly got the first one I saw. I now had two cars (the ’67 Camaro and this second one) and for the third car I had two candidates: a chrome The Gov’ner and some muscle car with a nice tinted chrome base. My wife and daughter didn’t like the chrome car, so I got the muscle car. I had unwittingly chosen a Fast & Furious ’69 Dodge Charger Daytona.

My wife and I do not collect scale models of muscle cars, but earlier today I saw a 2013 Hot Wheels ’67 Camaro that was so beautiful that I just had to buy it. I thought it was very unusual for a main line Hot Wheels because it had a metal base, a metal body, and an opening hood.

After searching the internet, I discovered that there is a Super Secret Treasure Hunt version of this car. There are also many variations of it. Some have a Hot Wheels logo on the base, while others don’t. Some have a raised dashboard, while others don’t. I’ve heard that some have the motor painted black, while others have the motor unpainted. There are also variants with no door handles or door lines, with door handles only, with door lines only, and with door handles and door lines.

Mine is a main line version with a logo on the base, a raised dashboard, and no door handles or door lines. (I’m not opening the blister pack, so I’ll never know if the engine is painted or not.) Its base code is F16, so it was made around the third week of April 2013.

I’ve reverse-engineered the Sinclair Scientific calculator. The remarkable thing about this calculator is they took a simple 4-function calculator chip and reprogrammed its 320-instruction ROM to be a full scientific calculator. By looking at the chip, I’ve extracted the original code, reverse-engineered how it works, and written a JavaScript simulator that runs the original code and shows what the calculator is doing internally.

The 2014 Bicol Mathematics Conference will be held on February 7–8, 2014 at the Ateneo de Naga University. We are inviting mathematicians and mathematics educators especially those in the Bicol region to present a 30-minute talk. More details can be found in the call for papers.

I’m currently teaching an undergraduate course on ordinary differential equations using the 8th edition of Elementary Differential Equations by Rainville, Bedient, and Bedient (published in 1996 by Prentice Hall). I’ve always wanted to have a blog post containing some LaTeX (using the plug-in WP LaTeX), so in this blog post I’ll be showing my solution to one of the exercises in the book.

These two beauties deserve a blog post of their own. (Click on the pictures to see where I got them from.) The one on the left is what I want; it stands out quietly, saying “yes, I’m beautiful, but I’m humble about it.” (I just showed the one on the right for context.) The Casio employees who designed these should get promoted.